39 - Hotline Audunpoint [Cherno]

Vital intel revealed itself when she reached the next floor up and glanced down the hall. Hushed voices accompanied tense and scared faces peering out from cracked-open apartment doors. She wouldn’t have to clear the whole building.

As for those on the third, uppermost floor, they seemed to have decided that it would be best to wait for her rather than come down. The better of two choices, true, but nonetheless a doomed tactic. Krahe picked out one of the people peering out from inside an apartment, a small child with an innocent wonder in his eyes, and came up to him. A small lizard-boy.

“I need to go through your home, out the window,” she said to him, and the child let her through, to the absolute terror of his anthropomorphic komodo-dragon parents. Krahe was gone in moments, passing through their two-room abode like a ghost and leaving out the window. She climbed up to the next floor using the many handholds that this venerable architecture provided. Thereafter, she smashed in the window and immediately threw in a short-fused smoke grenade. On one hand, there were two obvious gangsters sitting by a table playing cards, audibly guffawing about the commotion downstairs, seemingly not taking it seriously. Krahe figured they were used to intergang skirmishes.

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The window broke. A spherical something tumbled through, and then there was smoke. Rancid, horrid smoke that burned the eyes.

Before they could spring into action, one of them was already dead. A blade of searing heat smashed right into the survivor’s chest, tearing apart Ward and armor and skin, only to sputter out and die. The blade of a knife followed with it, but he was gone from its reach by then. A woman’s scoff. Three gunshots in three seconds. He was dead on the spot.

Three of his friends rushed to the room, following the noise. The green-eyed devil had smoked it up all over again by that point, hiding behind a corner. A flash of the heat-knife, another man down. Three more gunshots. An overloaded barrier, the Second man went to the ground puking green sludge. The Third, a woman, met her end by way of grappling; Wards did nothing to stop the holds and takedowns which that demon employed, and before the smoke could clear, the third no longer had a congruent brain.

The second, by the time his meltdown ended, saw her face. It was burned into his brain when he caught three bullets to the head, and did not die, because he raised his Barrier and his Wards were strong. She raised her knife, only to see that the blade was warped and useless, and threw it aside.

The Anathemist made her gun vanish into a fanged maw on her palm as she lunged at the Second, hooking one leg and pressing her coal-skinned claw of a left hand to the side of his head. Her face centimeters away from his, the Second felt that sickly burn and saw the rising crimson glow. He thrashed in wild-eyed, fight-or-flight panic, and she released him, but an eruption of preternatural heat boiled the brain inside his skull before he could cross the doorway.

She left, in that room, a scene of boiled gore and shadows burned into the walls. It was a sight that would soon become familiar to those who served Damrus Hashem.

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Scrambling. Doors creaking. Calling out for their comrades, then swearing in anger. Five sets of footsteps on the approach. A mechanical callout heard from the next room over: “WARNING: High velocity. Explosive pressure. Stand free.”

Was Monochrome here, or was that just the same type of belt? It didn’t matter. Krahe made her way back out the window, onto the tiny balcony, barely more than a ledge. One fool who leaned out to check soon met the pavement at terminal velocity, and a short-fused Burster went in right after he had been dragged out.

Purging, Krahe jumped to the next balcony over, kicking in the window and leaping through. A large projectile of some description struck the wall in her wake, tearing at her Wards with its passing. Cold. Very, very cold. The sound of the impact also insinuated ice. This room was laid out like a cell, its door open inward. Waiting for an occupant. She wasn’t that occupant. Rushing out into the hallway, she raised her gun to those survivors who exited the room. The first and second fell to two bullets with Anathema-imbued Tracers attached, each. Rather, not Anathema, but its waste, stored in her arm. Krahe decided to differentiate Anathema itself from that detritus; she would call it Isotope.

It was as much about the performance improvement as it was about getting rid of that flu-ish ache all throughout her flesh. The third, she missed with the first bullet, striking him on the shoulder with the second and its Tracer. He returned fire by sending a wave of needlepointed ice-spikes rushing down the hallway, forcing Krahe to jump straight up and wedge her legs between the walls. She let herself fall a moment later, raising her Barrier straight down. The construct-ice crumple-melted beneath her weight, and she sprinted further down the hallway to increase the distance; not because of that ice mage, but because of his silver-armored compatriot whom she glanced at the corridor’s far end. Door after door, all heavy-set, most closed, an open space at the top of the stairwell. She had not just reloaded by the time she reached that place, but also dropped a Burster behind herself.

Out from its eruption the silver warrior ran, just as unnaturally fast as Monochrome. Krahe pushed as hard as she could, collapsing flame into fusion and flooding her arm with Anathema as she popped off one bullet after the next. The silver man cranked his belt twice. It began the same warning vocalization as Monochrome’s belt had done in the pit, but this warrior leapt into a flying dropkick before the belt even finished the first word.